What, exactly, is good without God?

If there be no God, then, exactly what is good, what is evil, and what are they based on?

Of course, that's not what they mean, and not what they're asking, but I am a literalist. Words have meanings. What they intend to ask is more on the order of, can someone be good if they don't believe in God? But they're just not smart enough or perhaps literate enough to figure out how to correctly ask that very simple question.

By now you've probably seen one of these billboards, or heard about them on the internet. They are springing up all over the country, in a truly significant, carefully orchestrated major project involving multiple atheist and secularist organizations of general anti-religionists and specific anti-Christians.

Are you good without God?

Millions are.

is what these billboards shout. (Note that it doesn't say "belief" in God; it says without God, which literally means assuming the absence of God. And then it postulates that millions are indeed "good" in the absence of God.)

What is this all about? Why are unbelievers doing this?

It's another class warfare thing. It pretends to be attempting to eliminate all minorities in the promotion of perfect multi-culturalism in which everyone loves everyone in the great and perfect collective.

In general, they feign injury by being a minority of unbelievers in a nation of majority believers, and they would like to turn that around, and force their unbelief on the whole nation through anti-religion laws, and miss-adjudication of existing law based on the fraudulent, un-Constitutional separation of Church and state principle.

It's not enough for them to be allowed to not believe in God. They want everyone to be forced, by law, to at least act as though they don't believe in God. And, preferably, to actually end belief in God.

Then, maybe they wouldn't feel like a minority, and they wouldn't always be getting their little feelings hurt when most people around them suddenly bow their heads in prayer. Every time something like that happens, why, it just gives them such a psychological boo-boo that they almost can't go on with life surrounded by believers.

Poor dears.

This is an effort aimed at American children, pushed by various non-critical thinkers among various humanist, materialist, scientistic, secularist and, generally, super simplistic groups of sophists with a bone to pick against belief in God.

As we showed in the Does God Exist page, the existence of God is measurably more reasonable than the non-existence of God. The atheists cannot prove that God does not exist, yet they firmly believe that God does not exist, on faith alone. That makes them faithful people. They believe, by faith alone, with no supporting empirical or scientific evidence whatsoever, that God does not exist. You may call that whatever you wish, but I call it a religion, or a religious belief system.

But, to get to the point they are trying to make, with their very poor wording, can someone be "good" and not believe in God? Of course they can. The only question is what standard for defining "good" is used. In America, that standard is the ethos of America, which is, the Judeo-Christian Ethos. That is (or once was) the ethos of the whole of Western Civilization. And, that is (or once was) the basis for the legislation of new American law.

America was born a Christian nation, she was "Constituted" by Christians, and her population was, from the beginning, and continuing to this day, overwhelmingly Christian. Constitutionally, we have representative government, and we have representative law.

The secularists behind these billboards would like to change all that. But if they were to succeed, they would change a lot more than they intend to change. Including the very essence of right and wrong: good and evil, as historically recognized. Yes, it is possible to be "good" and not believe in God, just as it is possible to be "bad" and believe in God. So long as we're all using the same standard for "good" and "bad."

And where does such a standard for judging good and bad come from?That should be the real question. I have argued with atheists many times, and the almost universal argument they put forth on this issue is nonsensical. In a nutshell, it states that :

Morality and religion are two different things that have nothing to do with each other.

This is an argument that demonstrates a complete lack of a proper
sense of human history, or, perhaps, a mal-education / indoctrination
received from their own educators, who were themselves "educationally"
steeped in all the tenets of godless Marxism and Scientism, without having these tenets called Marxist or Scientistic. American formal education is today loaded down with pre-conditioned Useful Idiot educators, who are cranking out Useful Idiot graduates, mostly without full awareness of what they are really doing.

So, the educated "Good Without God" proponent has likely been educated in a lie, assuming he believes that "Morality and religion are two different things that have nothing to do with each other." Is a lie good, or bad, in the view of such a proponent? If you lie, are you still good, and further, if you live in a lie, are you still good? If you work to convince others of the "truth" of such a lie, are you still good?

In fact, how do you know that a lie is bad in the first place?

All morality comes forth from religion. This statement is presented as a statement of irrefutable fact. Morality, or, a moral code used by more than one person to guide human behavior, is born of religion. (Atheism, too, as a strictly faith-based belief system, is a religion.) As we said earlier, the American moral code and basis for representative law is the Judeo-Christian Ethos, which, I submit, represents the highest standard of human morality and decency on earth. Ever.

When you have no moral code for more than one person, you have every-man-for-himself morality, which is to say, no morality at all. If every man can decide for himself what's right and what's wrong, then there is no longer any such thing as right and wrong, and thus, no such thing as good or bad, universally understood.

The reason that Jews and Christians are good stems from the fact that they recognize a higher authority than man, and that moral "good and bad" are independent of man's opinion, as a matter of objective truth. Another word for Objective Truth is Reality.

Objective Truth is completely independent of the mind of man. It doesn't matter what we think of it, how we think of it or even if we think of it; objective truth does not change. Man cannot change it, because it does not come from man. It will continue unchanged long after we are all gone.

Atheists, by their own free will, do not believe any of that. They see nothing higher than man's "evolution" into a higher and higher thinking being. In that view, moral codes should change to keep up with the advancing human intellect, for there is nothing outside of man, nothing higher, upon which or from which to base a proper fixed sense of good versus bad. So, it should change with the times.

That is how the National Socialists in Nazi Germany were able to justify their solution to the Jewish Problem. That is how the Communists were able to justify the labor camps and the cruelty of the Soviet Union. They were, after all, striving for the perfection of human society, and therefore, the ends justified the means.

In the "Good Without God" movement, if the atheists are successful, then the two choices they will have left for themselves for judging good and bad in the future will be:

To periodically take a vote on something being good or bad, in a Democratic sort of way.

Rely on consensus among material scientists, as the various forms of Marxism did leading into World War II, to determine for everyone what is good and what is bad.

In the complete absence of God, there can be only material. Materialistic atheism says that all that exists, including life forms, are results of accidental collisions and interactions between different forms of matter, long processes of which resulted in, us. In such a belief system, good and bad make no sense. There is only that which is. If all there is is matter, then there is no good and there is no bad, and there are no rules. Survival of the fittest, perhaps, but even that has nothing to do with good or bad.

But that's not what the Good Without God peoplereally mean; at least, not the ones I have argued with. According to them, what they really mean, is to present the question:

If God really exists, can I still be a good person if I don't believe in Him or follow any religion.

Which is just short of an admission that God really exists and the atheist argument is wrong. So, at least this little subset of the Good Without God people show by their own arguments that God exists, that good and bad come from God, but that they have "good reasons" to question His existence, and that they can still be "good."

All of which I find extremely frustrating. They never quite get to the point of saying, yes, God must exist. They get right up to that point, but not past it.

Lord, give me strength.

One last thought, concerning the last line on the billboards and signs:

Millions are.

Sez who? You? Why on earth should anyone believe that you are the final arbiter of what is good?

Just askin'.

=====

Sarcastic Acronym Hover-Link Footnotes: For the convenience of those readers using devices that lack a mouse, these footnotes are provided for all webpages, in case any webpage contains any hover-links. (If you don't have a mouse, you can't "hover" it over a link without clicking just to see the simple acronym interpretation. Click a footnote link to see the gory details.)

I think you actually hit the nail on the head with this passing quote: "In general, they feign injury by being a minority of unbelievers in a nation of majority believers, and they would like to turn that around..." Like a fish tends to be blind to its sense of wetness from natural immersion in water, an atheist tends to be blind to the his sense of goodness from natural immersion in morality. The statement that morality and religion have nothing to do with each other is false. Morality is concerned with man's relation to man, while religion is concerned with man's relation to God. And while a man can embrace morality and deny God, a man cannot embrace God and deny morality.

Merry Christmas to you and your family.

Date: Sun Dec 22 09:30:13 2013From: Vic BiorsethComment:

John:

Exactly right.

In the Ethos of Western Civilization, the first few Commandments of God describe man's relationship with God (theology) and the rest describe man's relationship with his fellow man (morality.)

No one can really get away from the relationship between religion and morality. To deny God is to deny good, for there is no other fixed, permanent and true standard for determining "good."

Regards,

Vic

Date: Tue Oct 21 2014From: Vic BiorsethComment:

Changes pursuant to changing the website URL
and name from
Thinking Catholic Strategic
Center to
Catholic American Thinker.

Pulled the trigger on the 301 MOVE IT option
June 1, 2014. Working my way through all the webpages. .

Regards,

Vic

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The Absolute Stupidassism PagesWhen
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that out to everyone else. We have a real societal problem when large
numbers of grown, educated adults do not automatically recognize a
clearly stupid argument, position or proposition on the very first
encounter.

"We belong to the Church militant; and She is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass Her destruction. Not only in the far-off centuries of the early Church, but down through the ages and in this our day, the enemies of God and Christian civilization make bold to attack the Creator’s supreme dominion and sacrosanct human rights.”--Pope Pius XII

"It is not lawful to take the things of others to give to the poor. It is a sin worthy of punishment, not an act deserving a reward, to give away what belongs to others."--St. Francis of Assisi

Truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance
may deride it, but in the end, there it is.—Winston
Churchill

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who
deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.—Ayn Rand

Atheist Genesis:

In the beginning there was nothing, and nothing happened to nothing.
And then nothing accidentally exploded and created everything.
And then some bits of everything accidentally encountered other bits of everything and formed some new kinds of everything.
And then some bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into self-replicating bits of everything.
And then some self-replicating bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into dinosaurs.
See?

“ … for I have sworn upon
the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind
of man.” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in
the year of our Lord 1800. The context
involved resistance to any form of Christianity or Deism legally imposing
itself throughout the USA. We must wonder what he might say
about our current government's forced imposition of strict secularism – i.e.,
anti-theism – throughout the USA. I submit that legally enforced secularism of society, like theocracy, like Marxism,
and like Islam, is, precisely, a form of tyranny over the mind of man.Nothing good can come from the religious cleansing of Judaeo-Christian society. Government imposed secularism is just another form of theocracy.